How Does Periscope Appear To Its Users?

Periscope’s User Interface (UI) looks like this:

Source: CNET

Periscope’s mission is to provide an easy to use live streaming service at the palm of your hands and a swipe of your phone screen, therefore, implementing and maintaining a very simple user interface is key for Periscope. Let’s take it back to the target audience and remember that Twitter and Periscope have been working hand in hand since Twitter’s purchase of Periscope making Twitter’s target audience the same as Periscope’s target audience. Twitter has an easy to navigate UI along with a simple Information Architecture (IA) that provides an orderly structure that draws in and preserves target users. According to CNET, Twitter is considered one of “the easiest social media platforms to use” – it is quick, simple, and easy. It may be no surprise that Periscope’s UI and IA is just as simple and easy to understand, but also very similar to Twitter’s. As it is known that a majority of Twitter and Periscope users are educated, knowledge seeking individuals, it can be fair to assume that these individuals are occupied with jobs and careers and are on-the-go making it even more necessary for Periscope and Twitter to make their application interface and architecture easy and quick to solve and utilize. Now let’s examine details of Periscope’s UI and IA. Similar to Twitter, it offers a main page that gets straight to the point, which in this case is a page that tells you whether your followers are live or not as seen in the image above. It also tells you how many viewers are watching any current live streams and the subject of the stream if that user chooses to provide that information. Below the main page screen, you see two other menu items (a total of three including the main page displayed). These two items are for finding more connections to add to your account (the far right icon), and for starting your own live stream (the middle icon).

Source: CNET

The image above shows what the application interface looks like during a live stream. It appears the same whether you are watching someone else’s live stream or conducting your own. Your followers and connections are able to chat with you during your stream and these chats disappear after a few seconds or until the next set of chats pushes it off screen.